I must presume that Your Majesty has not had occasion to spend some years aboard ship with the same crew. Allow me, then, to report that there is a rapport that grows between men in long association at sea, an unspoken comprehension that outstrips the mere anticipation of orders to a point where they become almost unnecessary. Please do not think I am boasting when I say that my crew worked as a single creature with a hundred hands and a single mind between us, for in this particular, as in everything I set down here, my sole ambition is to apprise you of the facts. When I say then that it was not five minutes of the clock before we were set free of the Vargud and under way, I am being generous. The Dominic claimed a shallow draft, a proud mast, and Mister Kopler’s expert hand at the wheel. It was a combination that had seen us safely through a dozen pursuits. And yet, when I looked back across that wide sea, the governor’s ship was closing fast. The wind was not high, and I had great faith that whatever fortunate current the governor had happened upon would soon fail him, and we would make good our escape.
I was mistaken.
Over the following hour, it became clear that the governor’s ship was not only keeping pace with us, but gaining. Through my spyglass, I saw her prow cutting through the water as though driven by some invisible force. I also saw the unmistakable uniforms of the colonial guard upon her deck. There was something else, though, which I thought at first I only imagined. Upon the deck, towering over the soldiers, a massive statue stood reminiscent of nothing so much as a grotesque spider, and yet it was no spider. When I spied another such in the rigging, this one moving with the swift and sure motions of a thing alive, I recalled the objects on the Vargud that I had taken for crab’s legs. Improbable as it seemed, this was no statue, but a living thing, a beast as terrible as if ripped from the pages of Revelation. And further, one of these beasts had met its end there before the doomed ship had managed to escape its pursuers, and now two more, the colonial guard, and Governor Smith himself were racing toward me to finish the job. They carried more cannon than we did. They had many soldiers with muskets. Governor Smith had, it appeared, allied himself with the forces of Hell. There was aboard the Dominic not a word of panic, no weeping or prayer, but only the concentration that fear can bring, for we had no doubt that if we were caught, we would perish.
So much did the governor’s ship command my attention that I did not see or hear it when our guest regained the deck. I only caught a scent of blood and magnolia, took my spyglass from my eye, and she was beside me. Doctor Koch had bound her wounds in rag and gauze and strapped her left arm against her ribs, but she stood as sure as a woman uninjured. When she spoke, her voice was crisp.
“Where are we?”
I gave her our location in rough terms, and she insisted on seeing the charts. I watched her golden gaze flicker over my maps of the Carib Sea. She placed a single dusky finger on a place not far from our position.
“Here,” she said. “Take us here.”
“If we turn, they will intercept us.”
“If we continue without turning, they will overtake us. One will not be better than the other.”
“Is that where you were fleeing to the first time you were caught?” I asked.
“It is,” she said. “And it is our only hope now.”
I hesitated, I admit. Only a few hours earlier, I had seen this same woman ask to be returned to the ship on which she stood. I had carried her exhausted form in my arms. I had no cause to believe her in her right mind or to trust her judgment if she was. She sensed my reluctance and turned her eyes to me. In the dimness of the hold, when she had been half-mad with pain and fear, she had been a handsome woman. In the light of the Caribbean sun, she was unmatched. A joyful recklessness took me, and I smiled as fully and honestly as I had in years.
“Mister Kopler,” I called. “Hard to starboard!”
The Dominic groaned under the sudden change, her flanks and spars bent by the weight of the sea and the power of the air. The governor’s ship changed course as well, bringing her closer and closer to us. I could read the name on her side now. The Aphrodite bore down upon us so near I saw the puffs of smoke and heard the reports of rifles as the soldiers on her deck took aim on us, hoping for a lucky shot. The great spiderlike beasts were chittering and crawling along her yardarms and masts. Though she was not yet at broadsides to us, I saw her gunports beginning to open. The moment was very nearly upon us when flight would no longer be an option, and the battle would be joined.
Beside me, the woman’s attention was fixed not upon the doom bearing down upon us but at the clear waters on which we rode. Your Majesty will not, I think, have made the journey to the Caribbean. But as a man who has known many seas, let me assure you that no European sea, not even that nursery of civilization, the Mediterranean, can compare with the glasslike clarity the Caribbean can on occasion achieve. If one can train one’s eyes to see past the reflected sky, it is as though we rode upon empty air. I looked down with her at the mottled green of the ocean floor, nearer here than I had expected it to be, when, without warning, she let out a whoop of the purest joy. Far below us, that which I had taken for the ocean’s bottom moved, turning slowly up toward us. The sea boiled, and the dismayed cries of the Aphrodite carried across the waves. Four great, arching walls rose up from the water, reaching, it seemed nearly to the sky. Then, like Poseidon closing his fist around us, the arching walls met and blotted out the sun.
A roaring sound filled the world louder than anything I had ever heard, and I felt a sensation of terrible weight, as though divine hands were pressing down upon every atom of my being. Around me in the sudden gloom, I saw my men pressed slowly to the deck, and heard the protests of the Dominic as the wood all around groaned. I feared to see the ocean lapping at the rail, but the weight, whatever it was, appeared not to affect our buoyancy.
The woman slipped to the deck as well, borne down by the same terrible heaviness. Her face was an image of triumph, and it was the last thing I saw before darkness took me.
There is a gulf between worlds, Majesty, greater than any ocean. Its emptiness is only relieved by an unsetting sun that burns in the blackness and an unimaginable profusion of stars. Those ships that sail that upper abyss are greater than any leviathan of the lower waters that I once knew. How can I adequately describe the glory of the vessel into which I woke? How can I tell you of the grace of her lines, the power that permeated her? Imagine stepping into the vast nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where instead of stone, every arch is fashioned of living crystal that glows with light and power the improbable blue of a butterfly’s wing. Imagine the poor Dominic of Osma, which had housed myself and my men these many years, lying on her side like a child’s toy abandoned beside a stream while outside the vast window, the stars shine steady and unblinking as you have never seen through Earth’s fickle air.
And the enemy. As beautiful as the doomed Serkeriah was, her pursuers were her echo in grotesquerie. Inhuman and insectlike, they swarmed through the void, the thousand filthy talons of a single demonic hand. Their carapaces were lit from within by a baleful light that spoke of brimstone and sulfur. Serrated claws reached out from each of these unclean bodies in a design that promised that to be touched by one was to be not merely cut, but infected. And it was on one of these, Your Majesty, that the Right Honorable Governor Smith rode with his diabolical masters.